It’s just weird to see small businesses following the same process as FAANG to hire engineers. Even if you find an engineer who passes all leet code style tests, passes behavioral tests and 2/3 more random interviews. If that engineer is really that good, why would he waste his talent there? It’s exactly what I’m noticing right now. Rockstars are leaving within 6 months of employment and the company is struggling to fill a position that can be easily done by a mid level engineer with just basic programming experience.
I think you're probably correct. The next AI development (that people are experimenting with right now) is AGENCY. When AIs can learn about why they get bad feedback, and then decide to train themselves until they stop getting bad feedback, they won't be a replacement for people - they will be people. They will probably be the cheapest people. And then human people will not keep doing any work that they can do. OTOH, I think a lot of people like me will have the longest tail of the old-world. My company will probably not be able to automate me away, until the vendors of the software we use change stacks and eliminate java. But I can't see more than 3~10 years left. I honestly don't see any opportunities down the road. It's not much of a life making 30k in your forties. That's just death. I wish people could stop kidding themselves.
Well, thank you for the video. Certainly depressing, and I'm far less optimistic for the future after hearing it. I know that having a stable career and the expectation of the ability to work until I die isn't realistic, but it's painful when you start feeling the actual effects. Past time to start looking around for career pivots I guess.
So , Well , I am Living on SSI and If I Left the country and came in as a got away I would receive , more than twice of what I get Now on SSI and I am a 4th generation American and Worked 39 Quarters just the last time I worked , I Worked many years before that and I was born in the Summer of Love 1967 . What I worry about is What is fair for all . Already I have Never Used a Smartphone , Only flip fones and Burner's , I will Never shop at a Place that Won't Accept Cash . Inflation is Dangerous , you can Loose your Car or your House , You better "Buy Now" while the Premiums are this Low , I have faith in God, Peter Schiff, Robert Kiyosaki, George Gammon, Johnny Bravo, Mario Manecco, Neil McCoy-Ward, Rick Rule, Macro Alf, Lynette Zang , Doug Casey, Prof. S. Hanke, Gerald Celente, Gregory Mannarino and many others, Michael Oliver, and Andy Schectman , Rafi Farber . CBDC's and Crypto need Electricity and the Net , They can Never be Honest Money on a Scale like Silver and Gold Satoshi Nakamoto Means your Death , Your wealth is at the Whim of Others Blockchain was Made to Keep the Wealthy holding Wealth and The Undereducated Broke. Do you want to be the reason your grandkids get Killed by Digital Programmable Money ? Digital Programmable Money . CBDC's like China , Everything like China for your descendants .your fault ? Digital Money is a threat to Mankind , The End Result is we die leaving the children with their Doom and Demise. Fight Digital Money in any forum . Life does not promise you Electric Power or the Internet . Buy Gold and Silver . Stack something , Even Copper , Nickle and other Metals , Heck buy a Metal Detector just as Insurance to feed your family . Characteristics of sound money , You know where your Gold is .
Every so often visual programming tries to assert itself. I think we saw this as early as the 80s with 4GLs. The issue is maintainability and scale. You can’t scale these things without having to do things like pay addition licensing. Sometimes they charge you per CPU. This is when it gets so expensive yet you don’t “own” it. And with no source control it’s hard to recover from failure. I’m sure you could export it as json or some other format. But it’s not quite the same. So that’s yet another issue with these And some of these allow you to add custom code. Making your developers cost more because they are coding in proprietary tooling and it’s becomes harder to find them in the market. Coding isn’t pretty but it just has significant advantages over visual programming. Especially are you need to add more features
In general, yup to all of that. FWIW tho Flutterflow and bubble both offer backups, branching, and collaborative dev stuff. WRT more expensive devs working on proprietary, also yup. I have know a few people over the years who made a killing working on stuff like Salesforce and various BI tools. There's some interesting economics back and forth on that, eg is it better to have a bigger team working on open platforms or a smaller team working on proprietary? Personally I'd rather work on open but I know a lot of (esp non-technical) CxOs that would prefer the latter. That's part of why I included links to some of the open source options. For those, both the app and the underlying guts are all available.
Not quite sure I follow. A UBI is just a cash payment, taxation is very different. I think I can track if we get to where we all have Star Trek UBI, but that's so far out... 🤷♂️
@@ChangeNode Complex topic, you did a nice job with your video. Did the banking book you read talk about fractional reserve banking? If so, you understand money is fiat, whimsical, from nothing. Why do governments need our taxes? They don't. It is a further illusion of participation in the financial system. Governments and corporations need our creativity and production. Centralized banking is a blessing and curse. But in the end, more of a curse because pure debt is all we have.
@@T-Bone5160 Thanks! RE taxes, I think you already have the pieces. Taxes basically just serve as a sink for currency. Weirdly enough you are getting really close to the MMT guys as well. Why collect taxes? Why issue government debt at all? Debt is so strange. One version of it is as a way for the future to send resources into the past. A force multiplier, in every sense. Ties that bond. Everything based on trust. I find that if I substitute "resources" for "money" it actually simplifies a lot of things conceptually.
Lol, yeah, well, I'm just trying to walk folks through the numbers and what/when it might happen (ie not for a long time most likely). UBI is a reflexive talking point for a lot of tech folks esp WRT AI, so I wanted to get a video out on it. 🤷♂️
@@ChangeNode Good video, ideas worth talking about for sure. AGI will be the easy part. Living with the changes will be the challenge. I am conservative by nature and not very creative either. I see the value of the "creatives" and "classic liberal" openness to try new things/policies to move society forward. The Leftist have too much control and influence currently. If AGI is half of what it is hyped to be we need new approaches to "everything" and that will be very messy. Thank you for your efforts to move the conversation forward.
wrong. you didn't understand why companies can't afford software developers... The actual reason is taxes. There is a new tax code (section 174) which changes how you can write off specifically developer salaries. It used to be, if you spend a million dollars on developer salaries for a year, and you launch your product within that year, and you make a million bucks, you would have $0 in profit - as each penny you made so far really is paying back what was spend on its development. That changed IN THE MONTH OF THE MASSIVE LAYOFFS when the new tax law went into effect. NOW if you spend a million dollars on salaries, and you make a million bucks, uncle sam IN THE BEST SENARIO allows you to write off 20% of those costs... so you owe taxes on 800k of your 'profits'. SO not only are you breaking even, with nothing in the bank, you now must toss in an extra quarter of a million bucks from your own pocket to the tax man because f u that's why. That 20% also drops down to 6% if you don't hire domestically... Or think of this: you spend $10 million on software developers for one year, and only make $5 million in pre-tax sales? well, you LOST $5 million this year, but the government will charge you nearly a million bucks in taxes... ((5000000-(10000000*0.2))*0.3)=900k ... and again, if you don't hire ANY foreign developers. The second that went into effect - 400k developers lost their jobs, and most companies are now running a skeleton crew. Jobs will come back when the employees are not inherently tax liabilities for companies... or look at it this way: each $1.00 you spend on an employee, you're taking $0.80 from your profits and converting it directly into tax... companies are PAYING MONEY in salaries to LOSE MONEY in taxes... It's crazy and unsustainable. The only hope is reversing section 174, which they are trying to do as we speak, but I don't expect any changes for a few years at least. It's not AI (which is a joke... most AI gets in my way when programming not the other way around)... It's not (for the most part) interest rates... It's the bottom line is getting murdered by the taxes on developer salaries.
In someways the quality could improve with better testing of the development tools. But testing of the products is problematic. How will defects be addressed when the person responsible for fixing the app will not know the code at all? How will updates to the application be managed?
FWIW some of the tools such as bubble and FlutterFlow have source control, branching, etc built in already. WRT testing, honestly most of the places I've been only the server devs really do a lot of testing. In that scenario you would have the UI/UX folks on one track and the backend using modern CI/CD. This is pretty close to most places already - smoke only for UI, full suite for the backend. If you do build out a CI/CD stack for the front end (or even just automated smoke testing eg w/Puppeteer) you can point a test suite at any of these. Most of the problems with testing are IMHO management related, not the stack.
Capital borrowing costs have more than tripled because as boomers moved into retirement most moved away from higher risk investments for T bills, bonds, and low risk investments. That’s over 6 trillion wiped off the market making it more competitive to secure investments. It is not an interest rate issue.
Ooh, Peter Ziehan fan? Yeah, I don't know exactly how to tease apart the investing mix, the rates, and all the rest of it. I'm noticing the huge amounts moving into AI and robotics vs traditional software plays. I'm a bit skeptical that boomers rebalancing portfolios are the main driver for a variety of reasons. Any good data sources on this stuff beyond FRED stuff?
If governments give people money, jobs will just pay less. This will eventually lead to full UBI and zero work, as AGI takes over. AGI is going to destroy the economy because it's based on human labor.
Yeah, at least here in the US a minimum federal wage job income would also mean instantly qualifying for various poverty programs. A few big companies (eg Walmart) are sort of infamous for relying on this mix. So, you could make a pretty strong case that we are already here. WRT AI and AGI, the problem IMHO is time. The gap between the theory of AGI and what I can use today is pretty big. I don't think anyone really knows the timelines for any of this stuff.
No joke. I do think this is a big factor - for example, app exhaustion is real on mobile, I have more games than I could play in years in my Steam library, etc etc.
Great video. I heard about an upcoming doctor shortage, yet medical schools still strongly limit how many MDs graduate a year. I used to think this was stupid but now I realize they were artificially limiting supply of doctors to keep their jobs and prestige 💀 Software development is the opposite… 0 barriers to entry + boot camps and oversaturated supply lead to the current problem.
Yeah, different fields come to different places for different reasons. I think that some of the doctor stuff comes from wanting to protect the field from quacks, but it's also very clearly more like an old school guild system in a lot of ways. I read that the guy that invented the whole "work insane shifts for training" thing was lit up like crazy on cocaine, which tbh tracks. Sigh.
Easy answer. $18k. Humanoid capabilities can be build for under $6k and triple it for dev and gpu costs. Source I am an AI for robotics founder. Disclaimer: I am biased.
My thinking is that software developers will just becomes shoe designers, to use your shoe analogy, as opposed to shoe makers. They're still 'making' shoes, but now their knowledge must encompass materials design at scale, manufacturing at scale with automated machinary, etc. The product remains the same, we're still trying to make a good shoe, but we're able to do it faster, better and cheaper. At least, that's the hope.
Yeah, I just think that we will need a lot fewer shoe designers and they will be paid a lot less. If you are new to the field and can make, eg US$90k and that's a big upgrade that's awesome. If you currently make US$200k and get replaced by the US$90k person, less awesome. That's my guess on where it's going...
I suppose if you're being paid $200k, you'd need to ask yourself what value you are bringing to whomever is paying you. If you were a senior, perhaps now you can replace the staff dev above you by leveraging AI. You can look at it from a rat-race perspective and be scared that AI is gonna replace some of your responsibilities, or you can look at it from an expansionist perspective and realize that AI also gives you a pathway to gaining more skills quickly. Ultimately, software devs/engineers need to ask themselves what impact they have on their company, and perhaps the real goal is to learn how to expand that impact. I mean, we're here to solve problems for the business, whether it's on the technical-side, product-side, or a combination of both.
Kind feel like you are tip-toeing around a very uncomfortable topic for you and many other senior developers, especially. There's no need to sugar coat things. I'm tired of ppl ducking their heads in the sand whenever Ai gets brought up. Just say the cold hard truth. I don't know as much as you i'm barely trying to break into the market as jr developer but please don't provide false hope just tell me how it is. How can the job market for developers and other technical areas "recover" when Ai continues to drastically improve? ChatGPT is something completely unprecedented, we all know the landscape is going to change for software but i feel like you are afraid to say how it is going to change, because deep inside you know that it likely means exponentially less jobs for developers. idk man, a little transparency would be nice, i've been subscribed to you since you had like 800 subscribers, please be up front about this stuffs
@91dgross That is totally fair, and here's the best I can tell you - nobody knows. But here's kind of how I'm looking at it... Very high level, there's a few options. 1. stuff like ChatGPT basically works like now or gets a little bit better. There are a lot of folks that think that something like ChatGPT 4- 4o is approaching "as good as it gets." In that scenario, I do think that dev jobs come back because it's just not reliable enough, esp when rates come down. 2. if stuff like ChatGPT et al and esp the robotics stuff gets as good as the folks pouring billions into it right now think it will be, then frankly none of it matters because the ai & robots will literally be able to do anything a human can, well then everything we know about society today is over. Capitalism, jobs, all of it. Gone. The main reason I'm not focusing exclusively on #2 is because a) it could take a decade or two, and in the meantime gotta put food on the table and b) it might not happen. My nightmare is telling folks "game over" and then it takes 10-20 years (if ever). Then a bunch of people quit jobs/give up/etc waiting for the AI revolution. The weird part is that if we do manage to build ai/robots/etc we would as a society on paper become unfathomably wealthly. The real reason I think everyone is nervous is because we already are incredibly bad at social fairness, and this will absolutely rip off any pretense. So it's this incredibly weird situation where on the one hand we have incredible wealth, incredible social change, etc... And the way all of this gets allocated? Our existing institutions are completely inadequate. So, straight up, my best guess is that either we can figure out all of the politics around allocation or it could mean revolution. Fortunately people are, like, super chill about discussions around economic politics. Ahem. Ack. So yeah, you are absolutely right that there's a lot of tip toe-ing going on right now, because it's all bonkers and everyone is already freaked out. I'm going to mull this one over and see if I can tackle it in a video without annoying absolutely everyone lol.
I just stumbled upon this going down an AI RU-vid algorithm wormhole. You did an excellent job teaching with your way of communicating. Second note. Great camera set up. Super sharp off-centered focus on yourself. It makes it feel like a private conversation with your voice.
I don't think it's a good idea. First, only very niche hardware spaces are still okay: FPGA, ASIC... but forget about GPU, CPU, and above all MCUs. These are massively oversupplied fields with thousands of applicants only from India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philippines etc. Second, most software developers need years to become proficient on hw.
Yeah, most of the robotics/hw folks responding in the comments have all basically said "don't" Part of what I wanted to do was gently explain to folks how much work it is. Kind of like being a doctor or electrician, I think a lot of folks don't realize how hard/difficult it is, but if you love it you love it...
A little pessimistic approach but valid points. Robotics is hard. So If you are under 30 years old, you must start to lean towards robotics. Considering with Starlink, robotics and IoT will be every open field you can even think. Farming, travelling, autonomous vehicles, remote construction operators etc... Data science has limited seats, plus it can be done by AI way easier than SW. It has been around some time. Also I believe LLMs requires a lot of capital before even be a product. Plus AI market is "winner takes all" market. Whoever comes with AGI first, the game is over. It'll be next giga success. As someone who lives in Europe, knowing some domain information,I'll rely on fintech dinasours to not wanting to change their tech stack anytime soon, until always when it is too late.
These low-code app builders have been common in the enterprise for a long time. I've been working with one in particular for close to a decade now. While you can do a lot without writing code, knowing how to code makes you a MUCH better developer, as almost all of them have ways they can be extended with code, as you mentioned. Most developers working on these tools in large companies don't have much formal programming knowledge or experience, so there's a lot of opportunity out there for people with programming skills who want to pick up one of these platforms and work with it. Also, since they're all specific tech stacks, the labor pools tend to be smaller individually, and the salaries are actually pretty decent. One thing to remember is that using visual tools to code is still programming. You're still a knowledge worker!
I feel like it's just a natural maturity of the Software industry like most other high skilled profession. Maybe I'm just a snob but I never considered building something like a web-store as engineering. So yeah, we might lose the need for a lot of "coding" jobs, but I don't see Software Engineering being in danger any time soon, but it might be over for those who were able to find a 100k job by learning some html/css/js in a 3 month bootcamp.
Oh man, I went through a serious case of pure tech withdrawal when I moved up from the bay area to Seattle around 2004. Bay area esp in the 90s "let's make a compiler" was a pretty cool business plan, up here in Seattle it was almost all retail software/ecommerce stuff until AWS/Azure/GCP cloud took over. Then I see something like github.com/HigherOrderCO/bend and I'm thinking maybe it's time to work on a compiler lol...
Its bad because now if it takes longer than 6 months to find a new job your food stamps and medicaid have work requirements even for those over 50 so some people are going to starve to death. The way layoffs are handled in the US could be considered a form of extrajudicial execution of surplus labor.
Yes. There are a lot of folks in the US that are and will suffer greatly. I think about this a lot. That's part of why I did the UBI video (that almost nobody watched sigh). I know a lot of people that are looking at an early retirement/pseudo retirement, possibly combined with a move.
I used various drag and drop over the years, meaning home grown or open source. These nocode lowcode variant as a hosted service, without the ability to install a module in react (or your fav framework) and compile and run without the cloud - I mean if I can't run it without the internet, never mind about the subscription price - then its worthless. At least for my work, complex applications going in embedded systems or internet based enterprise applications interacting with embedded (IoT without all the cloud - as in a simple LAN). I think drag and drop to design UIs is great, but only if i can later refine and calibrate the code with my own fingers and a "must" is that it is stand alone - not running on someone else's cloud.
FWIW flutterflow exports to local builds for sure. I’ve seen stuff in the marketplace that says the you can export bubble to mobile/desktop but haven’t played with that myself.
Tony Seba predicts humanoid robots will start at a cost of 10 usd per hour of work and then a fasr decline to 1 dollar per hour and by 2035 10 cents per hour. Billions will be deployed around the world
You are so wrong, I'm sorry, but its laughable. I will start with a quote, "In 1889, Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office. He is widely quoted as having stated that the patent office would soon need to shrink in size, and eventually close, because, according to his perspective: - Everything that can be invented has been invented." That summarizes the quality of your insight and you are not alone, it summarizes the quality of insight of the large tech companies that have just laid off thousands of developers. Here is a different vision, everything you own and use, hardware, software, your car, your refrigerator, your desk top software, your cell phone, your router and modem, your video display, the machine tools in all the factories that made all of those things, the logistic systems that managed their journey to market, the control systems that are used for all of our civilian utilities, every major weapon system in the US arsenal, the satellites overhead, every robot made to date, all of that and so much more is, as of yesterday, OBSOLETE. With the advent of AI enabled expert systems every controller chip, every bit of silicon in your laptop, your internet provider's network, your camera, all of the software and firmware that is needed for all of those systems is obsolete. AND, the tech companies that do not start TODAY RE-engineering everything they sell from the ground up, will be the company that does not survive into the future. Compared to what it can and must be, every Oracle, Microsoft product is obsolete. Your MS Word application is obsolete. Imagine that you are a medical writer, a doctor, a researcher, and you need to compose an article, or research a topic, then an AI expert system structured for your field will be much more productive than a general purpose Word office version which has a few new minor AI features tacked on to the GP application. Every application in every IT system in every private company and in our public institutions is obsolete, for the most part they are like passive systems that require expert users to enable t hem to do what they are used for, they require expert users to constantly move data back and forth between systems to make them useful at all, but expert AI enabled systems that can communicate and share data and intelligence, will make those applications and their users substantially more productive. Products and services that we can not even imagine will be produced in the future given these new forms of technology. The bone head leadership of Google and the likes who laid off so many developers because they to not really know how to take the next step with AI, and LLMs, SLMs, or how to transition to future fully expert system AI designed from the ground up applications. They know the future will be very different than the present and the past, and they know it will be expensive to get there, so they laid off a lot of developers working on legacy systems. But those tech companies who do not start now on revising all of their products with these new capabilities will be the companies that do not survive.
You are so wrong, I'm sorry, but its laughable. I will start with a quote, "In 1889, Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office. He is widely quoted as having stated that the patent office would soon need to shrink in size, and eventually close, because, according to his perspective: - Everything that can be invented has been invented." That summarizes the quality of your insight and you are not alone, it summarizes the quality of insight of the large tech companies that have just laid off thousands of developers. Here is a different vision, everything you own and use, hardware, software, your car, your refrigerator, your desk top software, your cell phone, your router and modem, your video display, the machine tools in all the factories that made all of those things, the logistic systems that managed their journey to market, the control systems that are used for all of our civilian utilities, every major weapon system in the US arsenal, the satellites overhead, every robot made to date, all of that and so much more is, as of yesterday, OBSOLETE. With the advent of AI enabled expert systems every controller chip, every bit of silicon in your laptop, your internet provider's network, your camera, all of the software and firmware that is needed for all of those systems is obsolete. AND, the tech companies that do not start TODAY RE-engineering everything they sell from the ground up, will be the company that does not survive into the future. Compared to what it can and must be, every Oracle, Microsoft product is obsolete. Your MS Word application is obsolete. Imagine that you are a medical writer, a doctor, a researcher, and you need to compose an article, or research a topic, then an AI expert system structured for your field will be much more productive than a general purpose Word office version which has a few new minor AI features tacked on to the GP application. Every application in every IT system in every private company and in our public institutions is obsolete, for the most part they are like passive systems that require expert users to enable t hem to do what they are used for, they require expert users to constantly move data back and forth between systems to make them useful at all, but expert AI enabled systems that can communicate and share data and intelligence, will make those applications and their users substantially more productive. Products and services that we can not even imagine will be produced in the future given these new forms of technology. The bone head leadership of Google and the likes who laid off so many developers because they to not really know how to take the next step with AI, and LLMs, SLMs, or how to transition to future fully expert system AI designed from the ground up applications. They know the future will be very different than the present and the past, and they know it will be expensive to get there, so they laid off a lot of developers working on legacy systems. But those tech companies who do not start now on revising all of their products with these new capabilities will be the companies that do not survive.
From an education standpoint, is there merit in learning how to write code by hand before learning these drag and drop tools? Or should it be the other way around?
IMHO 100% huge to know how to write code as otherwise you are just going to be looking at a sea of stuff and have no idea how to debug it when it goes wrong. Being able to fix / diagnose stuff is huge. That said, when it comes to these tools I would also say that going through and learning how to use it properly is also helpful. Esp with some of the game dev tools I see senior folks just sort of skip the tooling and go straight to code, missing a lot of the point. So, I guess, both? For something like bubble I'd say HTML, CSS, JS/TS, and SQL will be very helpful.
I think the visual tools, i.e. drag and drop can be useful for describing visual aspects, i.e. screen layouts. Graphical flow tools may have some use in describing what I'd call higher level 'orchestrations' i.e. if this then go do that....however when it comes to even moderately complex business rules (as opposed to standard CRUD logic) I still think you need code. I do accept that the number of jobs to maintain the programs that the world needs may well drop drastically and may not be as well paid. Personally I loved the way the old WinForms apps worked, with a visual builder for the UI and then the ability to write C# against any event - I'd like to see a web based version of that.
Yeah, the UI/UX stuff esp w/responsive really does lend itself to the drag and drop tooling. There are so many of these tools nowadays I think it would take a week to go through them all, easy. Check out buildship and bubble, my guess is that they do a lot of what WinForms did, just different UI...
